Helen Bournas-Ney is a Greek-American poet who was born on the island of Ikaria. She is the recipient of the Anaïs Nin Fellowship for her work on Rimbaud and the Greek poet George Seferis. Helen has taught writing, mythology and literature courses, and has a special love for ekphrastic poetry. While serving as Assistant Director of the NYU Adult Learning Center, she was honored to share in the excitement of adult students, some of them immigrants, who grew in skill and confidence as they worked with passion to receive their high school equivalency diplomas. She also served as the Director of the Writing Center at SUNY Farmingdale and later established and ran her own learning center.

Her work has appeared in Plume - online and the anthology Plume Poetry 7, Ergon: Greek / American & Diaspora Arts and Letters, The Ekphrastic Review, One Sentence Poems, Bacopa Literary Review, Mom Egg Review, “30 Days of Poetry” sponsored by the New York Society Library, Blue Heron, and Earth’s Daughters. She was a chosen reader for the Unterberg Poetry Center of 92NY Participants Celebration. Her poetry was also nominated for Best of the Net and was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition for National Poetry Month 2023.

She has recently completed her first collection of poems, Just Like the Sky, but Nearer.